Ladino, otherwise known
as Judeo-Spanish, is the spoken and written Hispanic language of Jews of Spanish
origin. Ladino did not become a specifically Jewish language until after the
expulsion from Spain in 1492 - it was merely the language of their province.
It is also known as Judezmo, Dzhudezmo, or Spaniolit.

When the Jews were expelled
from Spain and Portugal they were cut off from the further development of
the language, but they continued to speak it in the communities and countries
to which they emigrated. Ladino therefore reflects the grammar and vocabulary
of 14th and 15th century Spanish. The further away from Spain the emigrants
went, the more cut off they were from developments in the language, and the
more Ladino began
to diverge from mainstream Castilian Spanish.

In Amsterdam, England
and Italy, those Jews who continued to speak 'Ladino' were in constant contact
with Spain and therefore they basically continued to speak the Castilian Spanish
of the time. However, in the Sephardi communities of the Ottoman Empire, the
language not only retained the older forms of Spanish, but borrowed so many
words from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, and even French, that it became
more and more distorted. Ladino was nowhere near as diverse as the various
forms of Yiddish, but there were still two different dialects, which corresponded
to the different origins of the speakers.

'Oriental' Ladino was
spoken in Turkey and Rhodes and reflected Castilian Spanish, whereas 'Western'
Ladino was spoken in Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia and Romania, and preserved
the characteristics of northern Spanish and Portuguese. The vocabulary of
Ladino includes hundreds of archaic Spanish words which have disappeared from
modern day Spanish, and also includes many words from different languages
that have been substituted for the original Spanish word, from the various
places Ladino speaking Jews settled.

Some terms were actually
transferred from one community to another through commercial or cultural relations,
whereas others remained peculiar to particular communities. These foreign
words derive mainly from Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, and to a
lesser extent from Portuguese and Italian. In the Ladino spoken in Israel,
several words have been borrowed from Yiddish. For most of its lifetime, Ladino
was written in the Hebrew alphabet, in Rashi script, or in Solitro, a cursive
method of writting letters. It was only in the 20th century that Ladino was
ever written using the Latin alphabet. In fact, what is known as 'rashi script'
was originally a Ladino script which became used centuries after Rashi's death
in printed books to differentiate Rashi's commentary from the text of the
Torah.

At various times Ladino
has been spoken in North Africa, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria,
Romania, France, Israel, and, to a lesser extent, in the United States (the
highest populations being in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and south Florida)
and Latin America. By the beginning of this century, with the spread of compulsory
education in the language of the land, Ladino began to disintegrate. Emigration
to Israel from the Balkans hastened the decline of Ladino in Eastern Europe
and Turkey.

The Nazis destroyed most
of the communities in Europe where Ladino had been the first language among
Jews. Ladino speakers who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Latin America
tended to pick up regular Spanish very quickly, whilst others adopted the
language of whichever country they ended up in. Israel is now the country
with the greatest number of Ladino speakers, with about 200,000 people who
still speak or understand the language, but even they only know a very limited
and basic Ladino.

It is important to note
that Ladino is not modern Spanish, and also to note that just because someone
speaks modern Spanish, this fact alone does not make them Sephardic.